I'd run IPv6 but for this reason. I've looked around to see if there's a firmware upgrade for my routers that will support the new addressing scheme, but no dice, and I don't relish spending another $75 to$100 to replace 2 routers. I suppose I'm not the only guy in the world with this problem. So I guess there's your reason.

My ISP gave me the option to switch to IPv6. I did that. On my home network I am still using IPv4 and go through a NAT because I am a lazy person, but I can access IPv6 websites easily.

It happened once that someone sent a link to an IPv6 website on a mailing list I use, some people complained they could not access it but he said he had no way of having a fixed IPv4 address. I expect that as more people do that the pressure on ISPs will increase.

I'd run IPv6 but for this reason. I've looked around to see if there's a firmware upgrade for my routers that will support the new addressing scheme, but no dice, and I don't relish spending another $75 to$100 to replace 2 routers. I suppose I'm not the only guy in the world with this problem. So I guess there's your reason.

Pick up two $10 class PCs, two $5 LAN cards if necessary, less than an hour installing linux, all done and have fun. Educational, at least as educational as inserting a cdrom and googling for 15 seconds "how to get up iptables NAT" can be...

If you insist on new, you can buy appliance FWs over and over every other year, or you can buy an appliance PC like a Soekris once a decade or so... Sorta like buying cheap shoes at walmart every month or twice that cost shoes at Kohls every year...

More than you'd realize. But even so, their's no reason why IPv4 cannot be used by ISPs. NATs are used by many already. NATs for that matter are undoubtedly why IPv6 isn't taking off. They perpetuate ISPs' ability to sell static IP addresses at a premium while making it difficult for the rest to use devices as servers on home networks. Its just another example of big business trying to find ways to squeeze every last dime out of old paradigms to the detriment of progress.

In other words, converting to IPV6 is more expensive than keeping IPV4. Are YOU willing to pay an extra $5/mo for IPV6, along with everyone else using your particular ISP? No? Then you're just one of those customers that is trying to squeeze every last "free" thing they can get from big business.

If you want it, demand it, pay for it. But chances are, your puny wireless router can't do IPV6 and like most people are too cheap to buy one that does that properly.

I've actually chosen an ISP that provides IPv6 (Free.fr [www.free.fr]) over a very slightly cheaper one that doesn't.

It's not that I actually need native IPv6 (Miredo [remlab.net] works just fine), but providing native IPv6 indicates that the ISP is likely to be less clueless than its competitors when IPv4 addresses actually start running out. The assurance that they'll still be around next year is well worth the couple Euros I'm paying extra.

This is based on the idea that everyone wants to run services from home, and that's just not the case for the world outside Slashdot. The vast majority of people would have zero use for that functionality.

The reason people haven't leapt on IPv6 is because it's a pain in the ass. Organizationally, it's probably the worst transition you can imagine. We did a IPv4->IPv4 (public range to private range) transition company wide a few years back, and it was godawful, and that's just for a piddly ass/16 block t

I believe that any DOCSIS3 modem HAS to be IPv6 ready in some form, as part of the DOCSIS3 spec (please tell me if I'm wrong on this, but as far as I am aware, this is the case). Now I don't profess to know how NAT really works at the low level, but from my understanding, a router takes a single external IP and "shares" it via NAT as a (usually) 192.168.x.x IP.My question is this - is it possible to NAT an IPv6 IP to an IPv4 address? So while normally your external IP is 64.129.1.200 (for example) yet inter

Any of the recent Apple ones, like the Time Capsule I'm currently using with a tunnelbroker.net tunnel.

The real question is how many major websites support IPv6? Google (ipv6.google.com), Facebook (www.v6.facebook.com), and not too many others that I can think of. Normal people won't set up a tunnel or ask their ISP about v6 availability unless they have a reason to use it.

Slashdot itself is one site that should have been there years ago, given its techie nature. The last time I checked I could not find any

Enforcement (or at least serious stimulation) by the Government may well exactly what is required to get IPv6 off the ground. The main problem (on the consumer level at least) is the definitely the lack of equipment. Making it illegal to sell modem/routers which lack IPv6 support will fix that in no time making it way easier for providers to roll out dual-stack to there customers.
Providers could use DHCPv6 on their networks and simply issue an IPv6 range to anyone who's router requests it, no one will notice the difference. But currently that's just pointless because nobody will have an IPv6 capable modem, not even when they bought it yesterday.

I'm getting native dual-stack on my VDSL line at home, along with 7000 other customers. But they had to push their modem manufacturer (AVM) to get it properly implemented. Their list of supported modems [xs4all.nl] is depressingly short, it contains 3 AVM models which basically use the same firmware, one Draytek modem and two Cisco which aren't really what I'd call 'consumer grade'. But it works just fine, I'm pretty certain a customer who doesn't care wouldn't notice the difference.

As someone posted earlier, ISP to subscriber traffic can be IPv4 while backbone traffic between ISPs can be IPv6. I'd switch over right now if my ISP provides IPv6 to the home, even if it meant buying new routers.

I welcome you to the world of dual stacking. Just jump in, the water is nice. I've been there since the late 90s, maybe early 00s. Around a decade, anyway. The rest of the world will catch up, eventually.

Except that pure IPv6 networks aren't even what we're talking about here. Dual Stacking has been available for ages (and most OSes turn it on by default), but since your average home ISP (and their "router") won't touch IPv6, it's been sitting there doing nothing.

Really, the first step in getting IPv6 deployed is for ISPs to start handing out addresses. It's going to break a lot of stuff and people will have to go around fixing it all, but that has to be done anyway. Best to just get it out of the wa

I've tried to set up my home network to prefer my IPv6 tunnel from Sixxs over IPv4 but there are oh so many hosts on the net that only support IPv4. Slashdot.org is a great example of such a host...

Maybe if more websites and other services actually supported IPv6 we'd see it "take off". Currently it's a bit like complaining about no one taking the train when there are only two stations in the whole country.

No, but IPv6 adoption should have been happening by now. It's a bit like being hit by a train whilst standing in the tracks, you know eventually you're going to have to do something about it, but the engineer hasn't yet blown the horn, so clearly you can wait longer.

Good show. I was lucky enough to happen to have them pick my neighborhood. I wish they would roll it out everywhere, or someone would actually compete with them. Seems that neither of those will happen.

It sounds like your living in an area of the country with actual competition. Around here I've got the fastest connection offered, at a whopping 5mbps up from 4mbps a decade a go, and I have yet to get a speed test that tells me I'm getting anything over 3mbps.

And, the cost is $50 a month, before taxes, IIRC, if I want to switch to an ISP with decent latency, good luck, all of the options are pretty pathetic in that regards.

My ISP (Virgin Media) have said that they've "got enough" IPv4 addresses and that they'll start to look at IPv6 "sometime in 2012", so it's not like people are falling over each other to get IPv6 support up and running.

Let's say I'm an ISP and I have a bunch of IPv4 addresses. I can invest and convert my customers to IPv6 or only add new IPv6 customers. Or I can make like the IPv4 addresses are a rare commodity and charge more for them. Hmmmm... Gouge or invest, what will it be, what would Ma Bell do, where's my federal subsidy ?

One of the many possibilities for choosing the local part of the network is using the MAC address of the network interface. There are several other choices available, like choosing one manually or generating a random one (you can in fact generate random ones rather frequently, see "privacy extensions").

Depending on your OS vendor, one of these will be the default behavior, but you don't have to do it that way if you don't like it.

I believe the requirement of generating an EUI-64 address from the MAC address of the network interface isn't an absolute 'must', but a 'should', i.e. you can generate the last 64 bits of the IPv6 address in a different way if you wish (I think the RFC mentions doing this for privacy reasons?), the major requirement being that it is unique within the/64 subnet.

I think Windows Vista used EUI-64 to generate the last 64 bits of an IPv6 address, but Windows 7 generates it randomly?

Since IPv4 machines can be geographically located by triangulated pinging, you already are. The difference is, by having it openly uniquely identifiable, you get all the advantages of NEMO and MobileIP. (The practical upshot is that you can alter where you are on a network, or even switch Internet providers, without losing any active connections. A very, very useful idea if you want a laptop in an aircraft to have uninterrupted network coverage, since the protocol takes care of all the transitioning for you

From what little I have access to, I see it increasing. From what little they have access to, they see it increasing in absolute but decreasing in relative. I'm sure someone else out there can get an equally meaningless datapoint. Who cares.

I've switched at least some of my infrastructure over to v6. It just works. How boring. In other news, the sun rose in the east today.

I'm a network admin and I honestly don't know enough about it to be proficient or even comfortable. I, along with many in my position, are so swamped and overwhelmed in day-to-day operations that there is no chance of learning enough about it to be able to undertake the kinds of overhauls and ripple effects it would bring. I'd love to get some training and utilize it if there were some gains to be had without needing to replace massive amounts of gear or reorganizing/restructuring things... I just don't see

Absolutely, and I have been looking into it for some time now, not just sitting with thumb in orifice... but it also is not a pressing issue and does not appear to be anytime soon so I also can't waste time and energy on something that may or may not happen or happen as expected. I could see military going this route, but I don't see companies going easily since many have barely began to accept all of the costs and BS that got foisted on them with SOX and the like. I've been around the game long enough to k

That's why I spent time researching it long before it became significant. In fact, it's why I insist that people SHOULD research new technologies. When they do become essential, you are NEVER going to have time to learn them properly. Learning them in advance is the only workable solution.

In truth, IPv6 for an internal network doesn't make any sense at all, it's not worth the switch for most people. For the internet, it may make some sense if the cost of a fixed IP address is too much, and you provide or use a service that can't use NAT, and the people who are trying to reach you are from a new audience who are not IPv4 bound, and other means like dynamic DNS are not practical. The key question, isn't the number of IPv4 addresses available, but the number that absolutely must be fixed for people to go about their business... and that number is probably closer to a few million, than to 4 billion.

IMHO, the key problem here is that the powers that be are not letting IP addresses be allocated by the market, but rather by assignment. The market would automatically adjust supply, and demand, and once the cost reached a certain threshold (if ever)... that would determine when people think it's worth it to switch.

I remember a few years ago, I talked about how IPv6 was overrated on slashdot and in the tech community, and promptly got blown off and down voted. They may have had a fundamental understanding about the technology, but didn't jack fuck about the marketplace.

Are you aware that there is a limit on how many computers can be NATed behind a single IP address? Have you tried to get a static IP from an ISP lately? It's kind of expensive.

From a pure supply and demand perspective, we have run out of supply. How many people do you know that actually have a static IP address? Most of us are already NATed. Also, remember that in a marketplace, you can't just sell an IP address to anyone; the IP structure must remain well enough organized to be routable.

Not when I look it up. It returns no AAAA records. And I have IPv6 access.

Companies tend to use IPv6 DNS whitelisting, meaning if they don't think you really have IPv6 connectivity, then they don't return their IPv6 addresses in queries and so you end up using IPv4. Google does this for sure.

This makes it tough to measure how many people have/are using IPv6. If companies just switch their DNS whitelisting off (as they are expected to do on IPv6 day), then we'll see how much IPv6 traffic there really is.

That is the key reason we will never see IPv6: the entities that have to do something to make it happen have no incentive to do it, and a significant disincentive. IPv4 can be controlled by a few large organizations -- large telcos, governments, large technology corporations. IPv4 addresses are scarce and it is impossible for any new entity to come along and start challenging Verizon or Bell. Things like RFC 1918 addresses, NAT and tunneling make is possible for users to get stuff done in the face of IPv4 limits, so there is little subscriber-driven requirement to upgrade. End subscribers -- even very large ones -- essentially depend on the connectivity providers to lead the way in this sort of upgrade transition, and the large telcos have nothing to gain by giving up their de-facto oligopoly power in the market. Why should any guy with a couple of microwave dishes be able to go into business up against AT&T? That would be bad for business. As long as he does all that with RFC 1918 addresses, that's fine. But if IPv6 came to town, a guy like that would be selling fully routable connectivity, and that's no good at all.

If everyone is placed behind ISP-level NAT, which is the way things appear to be going, particularly in Asia, BitTorrent would go away. You can't do peer-to-peer communication if you can't receive incoming connections.

ISPs would love to get rid of BitTorrent, because it's more than half the traffic their customers use. ISPs would also love to get rid of people running servers off their home machines, something also prevented.

It would not surprise me at all if the movie and music industries would bribe^W con

I don't understand this. I can work with BitTorrent from behind my home router without doing anything special. It just works. Why would an additional level added at the ISP change anything?

That only works because others in your swarm aren't behind NAT.

Your PC is making an outgoing connection to another PC in the swarm to download content. If a PC in the swarm wants to download something from you, it notifies the tracker, which you're already connected to, and the tracker tells your PC to make an OUTGOING connection to the other PC.

If all the PCs in the swarm were behind NAT then nobody could transfer anything, because one side of every connection has to be NAT-free (or have ports forwarded).

Truth is, I don't expect IPv6 to be widespread for about 10 years. The reasoning being that:

- while we are technically out of IPs... this is not the world ending problem it's been hyped to be.. as evidenced by the world not ending- the stuff we should have been doing 10 years ago at the consumer level we are just starting to do now (how many _new_ home routers still don't do IPv6.. these will all need to be replaced. In a decade, there will probably be a noticable "IPv6 transition period" layer in all landfills.- carrier grade NAT "solves" everything

ISPs en-masse should have been giving people IPv6 addresses to play with _years_ ago. I have experimented with IPv6 locally and via tunnel, but it's just not worth it when I don't know how my ISP will allocate addresses. It also concerns me to think how they will roll this out to the masses... because they are going to have to make it user friendly and seemless to the large consumer base... which means it's probably going to be primitive, locked down, and very frustrating for anyone with technical savvy. I _hope_ they don't require everyone to use some half baked custom hardware with some propriatary switchover software that you _have_ to use.

I doubt many ISPs have more than 2^32 subscribers on a single subnet yet so it seems to me this would solve the problem for a very long time to come. All we need is some routers which do IPv4 to IPv6 conversion at the very top level.

that's ironic. We've just DISABLED (mid-Nov 2010) ipv4 traffic on our corporate borders because we don't need "normal" web browsing or v4 email. It's isolationist, we know, but we now get way more time in our national NOC and less desktop hassle. We are unusual in that we don't need v4 web or email, but we're not unusual in that we expect workers to work, not spend 50% of the time infecting our few remaining windows machines.No nat is good nat. v6 saves us loads of time for our techs. What the world

It depends some on the type of server involved. For example, with a webserver and a non-encrypted connection, the URI is contained in the request, so the DNS entry can point to a proxy server (such as Squid). The proxy handles the gateway onto IPv6 transparently, giving the illusion that the web request went directly to the destination. The fact that DNS didn't resolve to the webserver would never be visible to the user.

For other types of connection, you can only pull that specific trick if you are prepared to hide portions of the Internet. It also requires dynamic DNS and some of the trickery used for reverse NAT. A request comes in for an A record but only an AAAA record exists. The proxy has a pool of IPv4 addresses it can use and a map that associates an IPv4 address to an IPv6 address - your standard address-based (as opposed to port-based) DNAT but across protocols. The proxy creates a DDNS entry for the IPv6 server using an IPv4 address that's unique for that server. The proxy now knows exactly what IPv6 server to forward the requests to, so doesn't need to do any kind of packet inspection.

In this second case, all you're doing is ripping the payload out of one container and shoving it into an equal-sized container of the other protocol. TCP and UDP payloads don't change at all between containers and hardly any of the container information will be of any interest on the other side of the gateway.

This does limit you, though. If an ISP were to install a proxy of this kind, it would be limited to 16,711,680 simultaneous IPv4/IPv6 gateways if it wanted to avoid clashes with the existing IPv4 backbone. That's not the same as 16 million users, since 16 million users all accessing YouTube would still equal one gateway. It would have to be 16 million distinct IPv6 destinations and all at the same time (since an unused gateway can be closed and the DNS entry recycled).

Such proxies exist. In fact, the Naval Research Laboratory once wrote a really neat library back in the mid 90s that made it a cinch to not only write them but make them bi-directional (ie: an IPv6-only machine could access an IPv4-only machine behind such a proxy as easily the other way round). They're also not hard to write, since all the mechanisms you need are widely deployed.

A third solution does exist. IPv6 supports a format for embedded IPv4 addresses. (::127.0.0.1, for example, is perfectly legit IPv6.) So long as the IPv6 destination has a unique embedded IPv4 address as a valid record, a DNS server can return the embedded portion as an A record that uniquely identifies that machine in IPv4-space. Then all you need is payload copying between containers and no fancy address translation or DDNS support. This requires that only a fixed subset of all IPv6 machines are reachable, as opposed to the second solution which merely requires that a subset of IPv6 machines that is fixed for any given moment in time are reachable, so it's less flexible but can be installed as a module directly into a customer's router.

IPv6 proponents haven't been keen on these kinds of solution because cross-protocol NAT can only support those features that exist on both protocols, whereas the preferred dual-stack solution gives you the best of both worlds. I've always found that argument to be dubious, however, because it was obvious to me that transparent migration would be less likely to meet resistance since there would be zero impact on end-users. Now, fifteen years on, I'm more convinced than ever that the 6Bone working group made a disastrous mistake in pressing for dual-stack rather than transparent solutions. Sure, if they'd just handed me control I'd have botched it up somewhere else and probably far worse. Nonetheless, I'm torn between gloating evilly and screaming in disgust that an astonishingly stupid attempt at power-play has held back IPv6 progress for one and a half friggin' decades.

The short answer is no they can't, not at the carrier level. You can NAT6to4 but your really can't go the other way around. 6to4 works because you can allocate the entire ipv4 address space with a constant prefix and route all those addresses to the NAT. The NAT can then copy the payload into an ipv4 packet using the last 32 bits of the original destination address as the entire ipv4 address.

You can't go the other way around because the ipv6 space is bigger, and a machine that only speaks ipv4 would not

You can, and it is called NAT46. The problem is that it is not stateless

The problem is that addresses for the v4 side of the mapping have to be taken from a limited pool (most likely some subset of NET10) and they have to be shared between the NAT46 box and the DNS server. This raises two issues.

1: not everyone uses their ISPs DNS.2: even if a user is using their ISPs DNS there is no gaurantee they will be using the most local one

Furthermore some ISPs already have heavy pressure on NET10 (or have run out of NET10 addresses completely) for other uses. Adding mapping addresses as

Truth is, I don't expect IPv6 to be widespread for about 10 years. The reasoning being that:

But, at this point that would make IPv6 a recurring meme like the "year of the Linux desktop". IPv6 has been something that's going to happen Real Soon Now for a decade.

One of the barriers I see to consumer adoption of IPv6 is that people simply don't care about it... it's not an issue that consumers care about or understand. Another problem is that if consumers are suddenly forced to spend their own money to repl

Another component of the problem is that IPv6 is quite different from IPv4. Arguably better... but people don't like different.

I understand why it happened, the internet _is_ the legacy problem. You can't just roll out a patch to the internet every few years... once it's running it has to work for a long time. I think a lot of people saw this as a good opportunity to fix some other problems... and the result is people are going to have to change the way they think about certain things, which is going to lead to resistance.

Even myself, who enjoys change. I am comfortable with how NAT works. It makes sense to me. I hear things like "every device gets a public IP" and freak out. Now that I understand how it works (read: gateways suddenly became a lot more important) it's not so bad... but I can see why a lot of people, especially who don't work with networks as a career... are just saying "screw that, I'll deal when something actually happens to cause _me_ grief".

And there is no benifit to the ISP either. They can't charge more money to upgrade people to IPv6 because as you said, there is no benifit to the consumer. It just costs them money.. _and_ is going to generate more user issues which is more money and maybe some lost business.

Ultimately, until shit actually starts failing in a big way.. nothing is going to happen.

Well, why not let the sysadmins/network guys worry about the implications of IPv6?:)
Just get your apps v6 ready:)
Also, I suspect that a lot more people know that a "firewall" stops inbound connections than know that NAT does the same (assuming no port-forwarding-style NAT, etc).

And God no, please, NO MORE NAT. Definitely not in IPv6. We don't need it, and don't want it. It's a crock.

Tell them their favorite game or BitTorrent (and this includes some game patch downloads not just illegal movies) isn't working reliably because of NAT and that IPv6 will fix it and they will change over.

Yes, this is the more advanced users. A lot of people have children that qualify as more advanced users.

A family already spending $40/month on broadband isn't going to flinch at spending $100 on a new router every few years.

Actually, "we" are not out of IP addresses, for large definitions of "we". Certain countries have grown (in IP usage terms) far faster than expected, and are running out, and all the available blocks have been allocated to countries and/or upper ISPs.

OTOH, no one has been told that nothing is available to the individual or, worse, to a company, yet. At least not anywhere "important" (sorry, Peoples Republic of China, but you aren't important to Comcast, just as the

That's actually what I meant by "technically", as like you said, the individual can still get one from the large orgs who the addressed have been allocated. The fact that the top level of the internet can't get new IPs won't hurt us peons down here for some time.

BTW, consumer-owned routers will not be the problem. The problem will be the ISP-owned cable and/or DSL modems, the vast majority of which are likely to be flaky with IPV6.

Yup, the modem/router my ISP just "upgraded" me to is a _complete_ piece of junk (speedstream is anyone is curious) that they've made even worse by overlaying custom firmware. They have pretty much disabled every feature (and it didn't have many to

Agreed. I've been ready for IPv6 for years. All of my machines, mac, windows and linux are configured, my firewall/router/DNS server is configured, my WAP is configured. What's not configured is my ISP who doesn't seem to know what IPv6 is.

I don't know, 10 years are a long time. But the obstacles are clearly commercial in nature: all the big players have lots of IPv4 address, and these can become valuable capital. The transition to IPv6 would lower it in value. Therefore all existing players have a vested interest in delaying or even sabotaging IPv6. Plus the shortage of IPv4 creates a perfect market entry barrier for new competitors.

So I have come to the conclusion that the solution is legislation. We have left the transition so late that it is bound to be very very painful already. Any further delay and it may kill the internet as we know it, or at least parts of it.

Make the tech available first.. let people develop a desire for it. ISPs should be handing out IPv6 addresses to anyone who wants them. Let people play with them optionally... eventually more and more people will... and demand for it will increase. It would be a slow, gradual adoption devoide of excessive headaches...

way too rational to actually happen given the current track record though.

End to end connectivity is the main selling point, but apps like Skype use hacky work arounds that the end user doesn't need to know anything about. The tipping point is going to come when there start being some services only available via IPv6. APNIC has now run out of IPv4 addresses, so I imagine that some services in the Asia-Pacific region will start to be v6-only in the near futures. Not a huge problem, since most ISPs in the region are already providing dual-stack, so their customers probably won't notice, but people trying to connect from the USA will.

I wonder what would happen if Google decided to make HD videos on YouTube v6-only. I imagine some interesting conversations with tech support:

"Hi, I'm trying to watch some kittens on YouTube and it says I only have Internet 4 not Internet 6. I'm running Microsoft Internet 9, but it still doesn't work"
"Sorry, we don't provide IPv6 access, and Google requires that for HD videos on YouTube."
"You pee vee six? Don't confuse me with jargon I just want to watch the video. I paid for an Internet from you, but Google says it's an old Internet. How do I use the new Internet?"
"I'm sorry, but we don't support IPv6, there's no demand for it."
"Well, how do I upgrade to Internet 6? I pay you for Internet and I want to use Internet."

How this conversation ends depends largely on whether the ISP in question has any competition...

Would have been a heck of a lot funnier if you said her LAN is so big, it has a/48 v6 allocation whereas my woman has a cute little/64 sized allocation.All the guys in the neighborhood use her 6to4 service every night?My IPv6 tunnel to her has a long uptime?

Yes, IPv8 is going to feature 1024bit addresses just in case there's a few molecules in the galaxy that haven't gotten their unique address, and with room left in case we want to inhabit the rest of the universe.

Being able to remember the addresses isn't a particularly valid thing to consider, we need a much larger number of addresses than we currently have, consequently they're going to be hard to remember. IIRC if you're handing them out statically on that sort of a basis you're doing it wrong.

The thing is that there is a difference between not having any spare IPv4 networks to hand out from the top and Internet not working. Internet is kept together by way of network address translation. Correct me if I am wrong bearded network gurus, but to my understanding it is the 65536 ports that fill in for lacking addresses, correct? I mean, that's how and why NAT works, right?

Put another way, a home network usually is given a single address by its connecting entity - the ISP usually, but that doesn't res

The reason it's getting complaints on/. is while most of the general public will be absolutely fine, the techie nature here means quite a few people are likely to be running servers on their domestic connection.

You really want one layer of NAT for that at most - the layer at your gateway. If your ISP puts you on carrier-grade NAT, you're stuffed.

Doubtless ISPs will offer a real, honest-to-FSM IPv4 address, but they won't offer it to domestic subscribers. It'll be business users only, and it'll cost extra

Wow, the sheer incompetence is mind blowing. Yes, we could go almost indefinitely without IPv6, but it would be a situation of NAT upon NAT upon turtles, and well, lets be honest from there it's turtles all the way down.

The problem is that there are a lot of services which don't work with NAT, and if we limit ourselves to just the ones that do, there's all sorts of cool things which nobody will bother to invent because they're impossible.

As has often been suggested around here, just because something is goo

I can tunnel over to IPv6 (waste of time and bandwidth) or I can continue not to care about IPv6 and use the Internet like 95% of internet users who do not care for anything under the hood except for being able to access their email, banks, and facebook account.

It's not that you are missing anything, and it's not even the area you are talking about that is the main problem... it is corporations. (isn't it always:) Through greed, inefficient use, and myriad other issues *that* is where the bulk of the waste is. ISPs could definitely run like any global or even national company does with a private address space and NATing. I'd say 75% of users would never care or know the difference, the other 25% would gladly pay a few dollars to have an actual address. I'd much r

You'll notice that a lot of countries that have already adopted IPv6 on a big scale are also moving ahead of the US technologically and/or economically. This reminds me of a saying popular in F1 circles - if you're standing still, you're moving backwards.

So you are suggesting that going to 128 bit rather than 48 bit is the reason that there is no takeup of IPv6? I don't think it is the case. Whether you add 16 bit or 96, the code for routers and computers needs to be rewritten. This is the reason why prefixing 0.0 still makes your IPv5 addresses a different address (so all addresses in the US still need to change). Since everything needs to be changed anyway, it makes sense to throw in a few useful extra features. By the way, one of the reasons to go t